Written by

Wes

JOHNSON

turkey kebabs: Kevin Hess of rural Strafford describes how he turns wild turkey meat into his family’s popular turkey kebab dish for their Thanksgiving Day meal.

Kevin Hess and daughter Hannah, of rural Strafford, show off a large Eastern wild turkey that Kevin shot. Some of the family's trophies are shown at left, with one of them, top left, shot by son Zachary at age 6. / Kevin Hess

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When Thanksgiving lands at the Kevin Hess house, guests know there won’t be a store-bought Butterball waiting on the dining room table.

There’ll be mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade stuffing, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, of course. But the main feast is wild turkey shish kebabs from birds that Hess and his son Zachary harvested with shotguns in the Ozarks wilds.

“We eat all of the turkeys we kill — it cuts down on our meat bill,” Hess said. “We’re blessed to be in one of the best spots in the nation for wild turkey.”

Wild turkeys can be baked whole in a big pan in the oven. But Hess said there’s a lot of work involved in getting a whole wild bird ready to cook, not the least of which is plucking a million feathers from the skin. After many years of preparing wild turkeys for dinner, Hess said he prefers to cut the breast meat away from the bone and then chunk it into pieces ready for an overnight marinade.

“I’ll marinate it in Italian dressing, honestly the cheapest stuff is the best because it has more oil in it,” he said. “Then we’ll put the meat on a skewer, with red peppers, onions or any other vegetable you want and grill it, about 10 minutes on a side.

“It’s our favorite way of eating wild turkey, and there are usually no leftovers at our Thanksgiving meal.”

Family tradition

Hess carries on a turkey-hunting tradition that began years ago, when his dad took him turkey hunting on land near Lebanon.

“I killed my first one when I was 10,” he recalled. “We had busted a flock of young birds, and I remember we were behind a log, with dad doing the calls. Two birds came running in and I managed to shoot one of them.”

His first bird gave him quite a surprise. Hess said he ran excitedly to fetch the turkey and grabbed the bird.

“I went to pick it up, but it wasn’t quite dead yet. It liked to have beat me to death with its wings,” he recalled.

Though he enjoys deer hunting, Hess said there’s an art to taking wild turkeys.

“Turkey hunting is my passion,” he said. “The ability to work a bird — especially that first spring hunt — it’s completely addicting. When you hear that gobbling, you have to plan your strategy and move with him, speaking their language. They do speak to each other, and you have to learn what you’re saying to them.”

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Calling toms

Hess said he participated in numerous turkey-calling competitions, and has a good idea of what calls to make to draw in big toms. Wild turkeys have phenomenal eyesight, and he said a friend joked that if turkeys had the smelling ability of deer, “you’d never take a wild turkey.”

“They get a bad rap for being dumb birds, but if you hunt them very long, you’re the one who’ll end up feeling dumb.”

Hess, who earned a wildlife biology degree, described the varieties of wild turkeys, pointing out variations in feather colors and patterns between Easterns and Rio Grandes. Turkey beards and tail feather mounts adorn the walls of his “man cave,” sharing space with whitetail buck mounted heads.

In another room, he keeps the lower legs of some turkeys he’s shot, the length of their spurs an indication of age. Male turkeys use the spurs to fight rivals.

Two full-sized turkey mounts facing off in a would-be battle bring back a flood of memories.

Hess points to the biggest bird, an Eastern wild turkey his son shot with a .410-caliber shotgun.

“It was his first bird and weighed 23 and a half pounds,” Hess recalled. “What’s really unusual is that it had five beards — they usually only have two or three. This bird came in from behind us and walked right by our blind — it actually hit the blind when he came by. It was a darn good turkey.”

Daughter Hannah, 9, has sat with her dad in a deer stand during deer season but hasn’t yet tried taking a turkey.